To go on a holistic awakening journey, I recommend that you will need practices for your body, heart, mind, and soul. I give some recommendations for these below.
I also recommend setting intentions before embarking on any practice.
To explore my practices and guidance you can check out:
Body: Taking Care of Yourself
It’s important to take care of the physical aspects of life. Things like nutrition, fitness, and being in nice physical surroundings can make a huge difference to your baseline wellbeing. Finding physical practices that feel nourishing and joyful, like being in nature, sports, or dancing can be really beneficial.
If you’re going off the deep end of practice, it’s important to have a safe and cosy place to be based.
If you’re struggling on the path, it can be helpful to consider potential medical causes. Bryan writes about his year of struggle, which demonstrates the challenge and importance of taking care of the physical elements of life.
Heart: Therapeutic Practice
To go on a meaningful awakening journey, it’s vital to have an embodied therapeutic practice. Depth psychology describes how much of experience is subconscious; you need to open these deeper layers of experience and reprocess hidden beliefs to be able to come out of projection and connect with what is really present.
The skills that are necessary to develop in a therapeutic context are:
- Experiencing some kind of fundamental goodness (or Buddha Nature) underneath even challenging experiences
- Being able to feel emotions directly in the body from a place of secure attachment and regulation
- Owning your own experience and seeing how unprocessed pain can become projection
- Being able to distinguish between ‘parts’ and ‘Self energy’ (or habit pathways and Buddha Nature)
- Being able to listen to different aspects of yourself and others compassionately
- Having a way of peeling back the layers and connecting with the unconscious or shadow aspects of experience
- Having some internal moves available for resolving trauma and creating more emotional openness
- Developing healthy boundaries that are a natural expression of your truth
Working with a therapeutic modality is a bit like learning a martial art — it gives you a range of moves for relating to challenging content in your experience. It’s important to do some one-to-one or group therapy to start, but once you get a sense of some of the moves available and gain some confidence working with them, you can start to bring the moves into your meditation practice when challenging experiences arise.
Some examples of modalities that help you to develop these skills and experiences include Bio-Emotive Framework, Focusing, Internal Family Systems therapy, Shadow Work Therapy, NARM, Hakomi, Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, Core Transformation, Somatic Experiencing, Core Process Psychotherapy, and Alethia Unfolding.
Mind: Meditation Recommendations
Having a regular meditation practice is vital for going on a meaningful awakening journey. With a good meditation practice you develop the capacity to clearly perceive direct experience, including deconstructing rigid ideas about what that might be like.
It’s helpful to be able to understand the landscape of different types of meditation. Here are the types of meditation that I have found core to Awakening.
Body:
- Subtle body practice (for example, Qigong) — being in the direct experience of the body
- Concentration (or jhana) practice — being pleasantly absorbed in the flow of experience
Heart:
- Heart practices (for example, metta) – loving experience and coming from a place of care and equanimity
- Purification practice (for example, tonglen) — transforming challenging content with loving awareness
Mind:
- Open awareness (or non-dual) practice — opening into a more naturally spacious experience and putting down the need to be doing something all the time
- Noting (or vipassana) practice — being aware of the precise details of experience in real-time
Soul:
- Imaginal practice — connecting to immaterial aspects of experience
- Inquiry practice — becoming aware of your meaning-making and playing with that
You don’t need to be practicing all of these at once, having one solid practice can take you further than dabbling in lots of things, but it’s worth being aware of the wider landscape and where your practice fits into that. It’s also useful to know that if you are really stuck in your practice, trying a different approach can unlock things for you in unexpected ways.
When looking for guidance, some of my markers for a high-quality teacher are wholeness, breadth, depth, transparency, and integrity. You should get the sense that the teacher is sharing something real with you for your benefit from a place of expertise, rather than performing a fantasy or playing a status game.
Part of finding a teacher is listening to see if there is a resonance between who they are, what they are teaching, and whether that fits with where you are at on the path. You will probably need different teachers at different times.
Here is a list of teachers that I find inspiring and helpful. They all have a deep understanding of the roots of practice and share this outside of dogmatic hierarchies and views. The approaches are all grounded in Buddhist practice and retain a high openness towards reality and experience.
Each of the teachers tends to specialise or focus on one of the aspects of meditation but are well-versed across the full landscape, and this holistic understanding gets included in what they are teaching.
They are all quite advanced, so if you are just starting out, it may be helpful to start somewhere more beginner-friendly.
- Daniel Ingram — vipassana practice — Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha is a comprehensive overview of vipassana as a practice and where it can take you
- Michael Taft — open awareness — hundreds of hours of creative, guided non-dual meditations
- Rob Burbea — jhana, metta and imaginal practice — very in-depth recorded retreats
- Joost Vervoort — imaginal and inquiry practice — rich, guided meditations that expand the possibility of what practice and experience can be
- Ken McLeod’s Warrior’s Solution Retreat — purification practice — an amazing synthesis of Vajrayana practice and shadow work
If you are looking for a community to practice with or for more online guidance, here are some places you could check out: Berkeley Alembic, Gaia House, Jhana Community, Evolving Ground, Corey Hess, and Hermes Amara.
A 10-day in-person Goenka retreat (or similar) is often the way people start their serious meditation journey.
Soul: Individuation Practice
If you want to bring your practice off the cushion and into your life and relationships, then you will need to practice being in connection in a more whole way.
One aspect of this is through relationships, which can be explored through relational practices. The purpose of good relational practice is to welcome in a fuller range of your experience in an authentic way, without getting entangled in habitual relational patterns.
I have a guide to Group Practices. Some other relational practices are: Authentic Relating, Transformational Connection, Circling, Relatefulness, Art of Accomplishment, Social Noting, and Shared Inquiry Practices.
Another aspect of individuation is developing the relationship between you and the cosmos. It can be healthy to come out of relying on the social as your sole source of emotional energy and connect with something more mystical. Having a creative practice that expresses the depths of your experience can bring this to life.
Some things this could be are journaling, writing, learning, teaching, art, poetry, prayer, or music.
Holistic Awakening
Awakening is about focusing your spiritual path on experiencing true nature.
Whatever practices you’re doing should be giving you the skills to be more present with experience with a greater degree of clarity and transforming how you experience the world, rather than reinforcing habit pathways.
Working one-to-one with a teacher or coach can be vital for breaking out of fixed ideas about experience and orienting your awakening compass in the right direction.
You may also like to check out the intro page to my Awakening Course, which gives an overview of my model of awakening and where all these practices can take you.